In her book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard told about seeing a mockingbird dive straight down off the roof of a four-story building. "It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem ..." she wrote. The mockingbird, wings held tightly against its body, descending at 32 feet per second toward the earth, spread his wings at the last possible second and floated onto the ground. Dillard said she spotted this amazing display just as she rounded a corner. No one else was there to witness it. She connected the event to the old philosophical question about the tree falling in the forest. If no one were there to hear it, goes the conundrum, would it make a sound? "The answer must be," she stated, "... I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will sense them. The least we can do is try to be there."

Because in Jesus Christ the Word became flesh, truth and grace are at work in every place, whether or not we sense them. What we can do, of course, is to attempt to master the theme and then to try to be there wherever in life it is played anew.